Sitting on the interview dais with a Peroni and reflecting on what could very well be his final Ryder Cup, Justin Rose helped it click for me.
When asked what unites the European Ryder Cup team, Rose thought for a moment and gave an answer about “team culture” worthy of the Harvard Business School.
The Midnight Troubadour
Tough and timeless, this polo is built for the long ride. Featuring a crisp, non-collapsing collar and a rugged, stretchy fabric, it's the perfect shirt for any cowboy's wardrobe.
The whole moment is worth watching, but the upshot (with insightful additions from Rory McIlroy and Jon Rahm) was this: To a European player, the Ryder Cup is about history. More specifically, it’s about your chance to add to that history. It’s about playing a small role in a collective story that has been going on for decades. The entire privilege of the week is having the chance to help write the next chapter.
During the ranging answer, Rose, Rahm and McIlroy rattled off the names of the players responsible for making them love the Ryder Cup. Seve Ballesteros, of course. Jose Maria Olazabal and others.
“We're caretakers of this European jersey right now,” McIlroy said. “And we're hopefully going to pass it on in the future in a better spot than where we found it.”
Jon Rahm summed it up in a sentence.
“It's the ability to walk through those gates and those doors and forget about who you are outside of this week. What you have done or what you may do afterwards, really truly doesn't matter.”
There’s a trope that gets thrown around far too often about the Ryder Cup: The Europeans win the biennial event because they have more fun in the team room. They sing songs and give each other shit and they just look like they’re closer than the Americans. It’s an absurdly oversimplified way to look at things and it discounts both the immense talent on the European side and the two previous home blowouts in the United States.
But let’s be clear: The Europeans have now won eight of the last 11. They’ve won three in the United States since the last time the U.S. won on the road.
The team room stuff is not totally untrue; in my opinion, it’s just a bit incomplete. Listen to the players and they’ll tell you that the Europeans win more Ryder Cups partially because of the culture, but mostly because it’s been there for more than 40 years.
They meticulously plan everything, not with the expectation of winning every single one, but to make sure that the close ones break their way. They have continually made their players comfortable and confident to show up and play their best. Every one of those winning teams ends up feeling like it’s so much more than the sum of its parts.
Mine is armchair analysis, of course, but so often the Americans, by comparison, end up looking desperate to Not Lose. Soly said it well on our Sunday podcast: “All the things Europe does culture-wise look like they lead to confidence… Everything the U.S. does on their side looks like it leads to pressure.”
Listening to Rose, Rahm and McIlroy rattle off the hallowed names that built the European Ryder Cup culture, my American heart sank at the idea of the U.S. team trying to do the same. And it makes sense why. Even as a U.S. fan, the American moments that instinctively come to mind first for me are… Not Good.
Hunter Mahan, rain suits, Tom Watson, Hal Sutton. Tiger. Phil. Paris.
Even the good stuff involves a bunch of characters that the PGA Tour is currently trying to expunge from golf history. How can any of that become a rallying cry?
Which is why now has to be the time to restart the mindset. To get beaten down in Italy with that U.S. team is such a clear signal that something non-golf is going on here. And fixing it has to start now, while that feeling of getting beaten in Europe for the first time is still fresh in the minds of Scottie Scheffler, Max Homa, Xander Schauffle, Patrick Cantlay, Collin Morikawa and others.
McIlroy said in the press conference Sunday night that, because of all the home team advantages, winning a Ryder Cup on the road has become one of the most impressive feats in all of sports. If the American team wants to do it, it needs to start building an actual culture. The kind that takes more than a three-day scouting trip or a dinner party at Jack Nicklaus’ house to create.
When American fans talk about the camaraderie of the European team, the implication is very clear. If the U.S. team had a few chants and songs of their own, this 30-year European drought would have ended by now. But spend any time with the American team and you’ll learn quickly how different they are from their Euro counterparts. The worst idea, in my opinion, is to try to create some Kirkland Signature knock-off version of the European team culture.
It has to look and feel entirely different. And the few leaders the U.S. team possesses are the ones that are going to have to lead the charge.
• • •
Be honest about what happened this week.
Usually with European Ryder Cup losses there are plenty of outside forces to blame – a tricked up course set up or a captain that glitched out. That wasn’t the case in Italy.
You can squabble over a few of the pairings or invoke Lucas Glover or Keegan Bradley. Maybe they would have made a difference, but surely not enough to change the result.
What was far more interesting to me was the invasion of the body snatchers that happened across the first three sessions. From a golf perspective, that wasn’t actually Scottie Scheffler out there. Or Xander. Or Brooks Koepka. Or Sam Burns. Or Jordan Spieth. Or Rickie Fowler. Whoever those guys were, they were bad. The U.S. team can have all the data in the world, but it is entirely useless if different human beings show up to the first tee.
So what happened? Was it as simple as the moment, the situation and the opposing crowds being too big? Was it competitive rust from a long layoff? Was it illness? Was it jet lag? Overconfidence? Did you care too much? Did you care too little?
There may be a few outlier excuses from this week, but none of them would explain the last 30 years of Ryder Cups. They don’t explain why the same thing that happened at this event to Tiger Woods, Phil Mickelson, Jim Furyk and others is now happening to an entirely different crop of U.S. players.
It hasn’t been three decades of lucky bounces and unlikely holed putts for the Europeans. So what is it? Take some notes, get in a room and share your thoughts. Show some humility and honesty and fix it instead of showing up in 4 years assuming THIS NEXT group is different.
Things are not as far off as people think. Once they got comfortable, the U.S. split the final 20 points of this Ryder Cup on the road. If they could have gotten off to even a mediocre start, who knows how the final day shakes out? Instead, the thing was essentially over before it began.
The other thing they need to be honest about is whatever the hell is going on behind the scenes. The anonymous sources in the Cantlay reporting are easy to swat away. It’s a little different when Stefan Schauffle, Xander's dad and de facto agent, goes on the record with similar takes about paying players and not knowing if Xander was going to be on the team just weeks beforehand.
On our podcast this week, Max Homa continually refuted reports that there was any division in the team and I take him at his word that these distractions didn’t make their way into the team room. But the amount of smoke that’s building around those two makes it clear that these guys are making somebody’s life more difficult behind the scenes. If those headaches make their way to the tournament organizers, the captain, or countless other people, it’s hard to think they don’t become an overall negative timesuck on the organization as a whole.
I’m not going to pretend like the Ryder Cup is some scrappy upstart non-profit. I totally get the cynicism of any player who wants to get paid for helping to build this marketing behemoth (even if this conversation is one you will never, ever, ever, ever win in the court of public opinion). The Europeans see a home Ryder Cup as a way to fund and sustain the DP World Tour, the tour they came
Source: https://nolayingup.com/blog/ryder-cup-reviving-the-united-states